I'm taking steps to secure my laptop - from both a data security and physical security point of view.
I currently have full disk encryption with LUKS set up through the installer - this is pretty much a vanilla configuration as per installer defaults, with an unencrypted boot partition that asks me to unlock the disk.
In the case of my laptop being stolen, I don't have anything set up at the moment that would help me/the police recover it. For this reason, I want to configure a honey-trap that will allow the laptop to run Prey if a thief boots the laptop.
To do this, I want to move the standard GRUB, kernel and inital ramdisk onto a USB stick that I'll keep with me at all times. I'll install a copy of Tiny Core Linux (Or dare I say - Windows) on my laptop which will only boot when I don't plug in my USB stick.
To stop a potential thief from wiping the hard drive, I'm going to apply a BIOS password and disable booting from external devices. Obviously this wouldn't stop them removing the HDD and wiping it, but it's a step against a low-level thief.
If I do this, I won't be able to boot from my USB - so I'll need a way to chainload GRUB on my USB from GRUB on my hard drive.
Is this possible - if so, how can I do this/where can I find suitable documentation? Everywhere I've looked suggests using PLoP, LILO or some other software, when I'm sure this should be possible from GRUB alone.
Similarly, I could use UEFI Secure Boot to restrict booting onto only my honey trap and "true" kernels and initial ramdisks, but my laptop isn't UEFI-compatible :(
Similarly this could be an X/Y problem, so if you think I'm going about this the wrong way, feel free to suggest changes.